If Thinking Hurts, There’s a Practical Solution
By Adam Rolleston.
I would like to share a bit about my journey of discovery with the Technique here in the hope that it may be of benefit to anyone who has encountered similar difficulties.
F.M. Alexander makes a big thing in his writing about what he calls psychophysical unity. I have often heard it said, particularly in relation to health and wellbeing,[1] that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind. This language might imply that mind and body are essentially separate entities connected together in some way. But Alexander says mind and body are so interconnected as to be inseparable and even more closely related than this word implies[2]. Our experience may seem quite different. For example, before I knew about Alexander Technique I would say that I lived ‘in my head’ more or less all of the time. At times I was unaware of what was going on around me, and did not much enjoy inhabiting my body, if I can put it in that split way. I often had the experience of sitting, absorbed in a TV drama, and failing to notice that one of my cats had decided to sit on me!
My experience with the Technique has been that attending to the use of myself dissolves all perceived mind-body separation and transforms what it is like to be in the world. ‘Being in my head’ or doing things on ‘automatic pilot’, were for me familiar ways of being. There was also the experience of carrying on an internal monologue (or dialogue!). If I am attending to the contents of my thoughts, particularly in this way where I seem to be verbalising the thoughts to myself, it is very easy to get things out of proportion, to worry, panic even. I’ve had such an experience and found it unpleasant, and wanted a way out. But it seemed I only knew how to get deeper in and more caught up in thought.
I found the way out of the woods with the Alexander Technique, and this required nothing to work out, nothing to solve, no brain work, just a shift in attention to what F. M. Alexander called ‘use’. Happily, anyone of us has the power to change what we are attending to in the present moment.
Perhaps you’d like to experiment with this: attend to some sound – say the radio – then look outside at something you like – for example, a favourite tree. And now to your feet in contact with the ground. To change the field of attention, just stop and notice where it is. The problem is, there is no awareness that a choice is even being made to attend to patterns of thought that involve pulling out of shape that may be hurtful – until we stop. Pause. This is the first step.
Even pausing for a few seconds, attending to this thing we call use, can be enough to transform the whole experience. Of course, at the beginning it can seem very difficult to pause. This was certainly my experience, but with time it got easier. If I’m sitting in a chair, my feet in contact with the ground, my nervous system is continually feeding me a wealth of information about where I am in space, the shape I am, how warm or cold it is, the shape of the space I am in, sounds, the light, the smells. How aware I am of all of this depends on what I am attending to. To return to the cat example, it was because I was absorbed in the TV drama and was not taking my use into account that I may not have noticed when the cat decided to sit on me.
Attending to our use brings benefits, which is important. That way I can ‘stay in one piece’, maintain my equilibrium, stillness, absence of inner conflict. And I could say I am fully present in that moment. And all that is required is this simple quality of attending to the whole self within the wider space – to accepting the support of the ground and seat of the chair for these feet and legs, accepting the support of the back of the chair for this back. I am not, in this way of attending, disconnecting from the world in any way. I am not ‘going inwards’. If I’m really attending to these parts, the experience is clearly one of reconnecting with the world. Simply allowing the head to balance on top of the neck and the arms to rest through allowing the hands to be supported and giving attention to that support. If all this is genuinely what I am intending then I can say I am ‘just sitting’. And in this there is a quality of wide awareness wherein perhaps paradoxically the more I attend to this simple act of sitting, the bigger and wider the awareness of ‘the outside’ becomes.
It seems to me in fact that there is no separation between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’; there is just awareness arising, its quality depending on the nature of the attention given. That there is this continuum means in this moment, however fleeting it may be, there is no inner commentary or chatter, all of that disappears, dissolves.
I used to think to be ‘me’ had to mean there was some worrying, panicking and internal monologue going on. At first it seemed strange to be without this familiar experience, because what I recognised and held dear as ‘me’ was the one that worried, panicked and judged: What would remain of what it is like to be me when this activity and the accompanying pulling down was not there?
But soon it became clear how liberating it was! So it really is possible to bring about this change in this moment. I am not saying we can change everything we want to change about our life all at once. It can be difficult always to recognise the possibility of pausing and changing how we attend, especially in more demanding situations, where, even if we’ve been practising for a while, perhaps we still get a bit caught up in our old way of reacting. But we can work on applying the pause in those moments where it is most possible for us. A twelve-second pause when getting into the car, perhaps, or before making a phone call, or before going from sitting to standing to put the kettle on. It’s in these kinds of everyday moments we have a chance to bring about change. And also, importantly, to develop our skill of attending to our use. It’s amazing what the brain will make of each one of these opportunities; our use improves and improves and this puts us in with a much better chance of noticing the old pulling down reaction in those more challenging situations. And, in time, I learn to pause and choose a different more creative response. With practice, possibilities I never imagined have opened up.
[1] Psychologytoday.com – The Power of The Mind-body Connection
[2] Constructive Conscious Control of The Individual, F.M. Alexander, P4 para 3 (Mouritz)